When Luck Runs Out

by Terry Mixon

He was sure that if he’d trained in the use of the armor, he’d be able to make sense of what was happening, but he’d never had the need to do so. Lack of planning on his part.

  After a few seconds, they were through the plasma and inside a vast cavity filled with leaking atmosphere and flickering electrical discharges. His minders dragged him after the rest of the marines as they flooded into what looked like what was left of a primary corridor.

  The drop capsules had blasted open and expelled the Raiders, who were now advancing deeper into the station while the marines followed closely behind and provided support.

  Jake Peters and a squad of marines got Elise, Julia, and him settled into a protective cocoon as they followed them in. The remainder of the marines followed closely behind, providing a rear guard in case they were attacked from that direction.

  The section they’d entered was without power or atmosphere, so only the lights on the suits provided any illumination whatsoever. It was surreal.

  He hoped that the IFFs that he’d helped develop would prevent the necessity of engaging the automated defenses, but he knew how unlikely that was. There was no way the AI was going to trust its security to something that could exclude anyone. Not completely, anyway.

  There was a lot of chatter taking place over the com channels, but he couldn’t make out exactly what was going on. Everyone was speaking in what amounted to a military dialect. His suit decrypted the transmissions, but he didn’t understand the meaning of many of the words.

  That changed when somewhere up ahead, there was a bright flash of light that illuminated everything. He’d seen a plasma rifle fire before.

  “Contact,” someone said over the general channel. “Hard contact at the leading edge with automated weapons platforms. They aren’t firing at us, so we’re trashing them.”

  That was when the marines began firing all around them. They must’ve been swarmed by the automated weapons platforms, yet the mechanical defenses seemed unable to fire. Score one for him and his team.

  That didn’t mean that the things couldn’t block the way with sheer numbers. That would slow them down and give the master AI time to work on alternate defenses.

  When they got closer to the master AI, there’d undoubtedly be hardened defenses under the direct control of malevolent sentience. Their IFFs wouldn’t stop something like that.

  Once they’d broken through the weapons platforms, it took them hours of moving deliberately through the station to reach the very first of the obstacles. The battle station’s interior was a series of blocked-off areas that seemed designed to slow humans down.

  Numerous weapons clusters had to be assaulted, costing them people at every turn. The Raider and marine armor were tough, but people died taking every single position.

  After hours of that grind, they reached a heavily armored hatch blocking passage toward the central core. Luckily, Princess Kelsey had the perfect lock pick. Their leader wasn’t shy about using her plasma rifle to smash through the offending hatch.

  To his shock, it took multiple shots to breach the barrier. It was seriously overpowered and thick. He also suspected that it was backed by a battle screen of some kind. The master AI might not have access to the miniaturized technology that he’d co-opted to make Kelsey’s hammer, but it had the full power of the battle station itself.

  Five minutes later, they ran into another hatch just like the first, only this time, the battle screen was on their side. It took several minutes of heavy fire to breach the barrier and allow them through.

  There was no telling what the master AI was doing while they slogged through the defenses. Probably marshaling every other avenue of defense that it could get its electronic hands on.

  They came to a third barrier. It was much like the previous two, but if there was a battle screen, they couldn’t detect it. It was located where the computer center would be, so this might be it.

  “Send Carl up,” Kelsey said. “We’ve got to be careful about breaching this one, because we can’t risk blowing out the computer center.”

  Without waiting for any agreement from his minders, Carl headed forward and met Kelsey at the hatch. There was no obvious locking mechanism on the hatch, so he wasn’t sure that he would be of much help in getting through.

  “I think this is actually the place where we need to get Elise involved,” he said.

  Even though Elise was in marine armor and having to be carried by the marines because she couldn’t control it, her minders quickly brought her up. Julia was at her side.

  Rather than speak, Elise placed her hand against the hatch. Thirty seconds later, it slid open.

  Before any of them could do anything, a gout of plasma roared through the opening and engulfed them.

  Jared was able to see the initial attack through one of the stealthed drones that accompanied the marines in. He muffled a curse, his heart in his throat, when they were caught at the last minute and Lieutenant Grappin sacrificed himself and his fellow pilots in a suicidal charge.

  That incredibly selfless act had just given humanity the chance it needed to win.

  Of course, by this time, he and his ships had worries of their own. Every mobile platform in the system was headed their way now that they’d lit off their drives. There were more than enough ships to crush his force, so he had to dance away from a direct fight and try to engage them in clusters.

  Thankfully, they didn’t seem to mind.

  His staff kept track of the significant groupings of enemy vessels, and they’d been able to maneuver the fleet so that they’d be able to engage a group that was about half their size before the rest of the ships could close with them.

  That didn’t mean that this would be a cakewalk, but it meant they had the firepower to take out the ships and come out the other side in fighting condition. They’d take losses, and their combat capability would be degraded, but they could still drag this fight on long enough to make a difference.

  Hours passed as the enemy ships closed with them, and eventually, Marcus spoke.

  “We’ll engage in a missile duel in fifteen minutes, Admiral,” the AI said calmly. “I anticipate that we will win that fight, but the next group is almost at our current strength levels. That fight will be a tough one to survive, and the largest grouping of enemy vessels will hit us shortly after that. I cannot imagine that we will still be able to fight at that point.”

  “Then we’re going to have to hope that Kelsey and the rest do their jobs as quick as they can,” Jared said, stretching his back. “They have to be close to the master AI by now. If they can make it issue a stand-down order, we’ll live. If they can’t, we’ll make our final stand here.

  “Kelsey will come through. We just have to keep the faith. Is there anything that we can do to maximize our chances of surviving this first fight?”

  “There are some tactics that we can employ to engage their heaviest units with overwhelming firepower while using our own screening elements to try to peel away their protective destroyers. The downside of that is that it increases the amount of time that we’ll be engaged with them. Since we’re not attempting to evade, there’s very little we can do to reduce the overall impact of this combat on our forces.”

  Jared nodded. “Then kill them as fast as you can. Attack plan bravo it is.”

  The enemy force was displayed on his screen, and he watched it coming. There was no subtlety in how they were attacking. They weren’t even trying to screen their larger units from attack. It was like a flat-out race to get into missile range so that they could unload their weapons as quickly as possible.

  Was that because the master AI was of such importance to them that they didn’t care how many ships they lost? Was it just because the computers controlling those ships had no sense of self-preservation? Or was it some unknown factor that he just couldn’t imagine?

  In the end, it didn’t matter. All that counted was using their behavior to his advantage. Every ship that survived this fight would help with the se
cond engagement.

  Those that made it through the first two fights would be the ones with a chance to survive if Kelsey won. If she didn’t, that third group would wipe them out entirely.

  The AI-controlled ships began firing missiles at extreme range. Personally, he thought that was stupid. Not only were the chances of hitting anything at that range low, it gave away too much information about how the missiles were protecting themselves.

  Missiles used electronic countermeasures to evade the antimissile slugs his ships would use to defend themselves. That involved obscuring scanner readings and creating false images. What the computers didn’t seem to realize was that with enough time to observe how their missiles acted, Jared and his people could refine their defense.

  “The missiles are using Imperial defensive pattern Alpha Seven Five,” Marcus said. “It was part of the pre-Fall Imperial playbook. That lapse will allow us to be significantly more effective against this wave.”

  “Hold that,” Jared said. “We don’t want to be too effective in this first salvo. If they realize that we have their codes, they’re going to use something else.

  “There’s an old military axiom that you need to keep in mind, Marcus. When the enemy is busy making a mistake, don’t interrupt them.”

  That first wave of missiles washed over his forces, and there were some hits, because they weren’t defending against them as well as possible. Mostly, their battle screens protected the larger ships. Several destroyers took damage, but the casualty rates were low, and that made him happy, even though men and women under his command were gravely wounded or dead.

  Rather than waste missiles, he just let the enemy keep shooting as they came in. They switched up the ECM that they were using, but it was still something from the original Imperial playbook. When they were finally firmly in his own missile range, he ordered a strike using ECM designed to work against what they were most likely using for their defenses. He hoped it was going to be enough.

  The fight was brutal. Even though his ships had an edge, there were still a lot of missiles. Ships were bracketed and blown up. His destroyers began going first as they tried to screen the capital ships from incoming fire.

  Then the light and heavy cruisers began taking significant damage. They were a lot tougher than destroyers and could protect themselves with battle screens. That meant that many of them would survive this initial encounter, but they’d be chewed up by the time it was done.

  Unlike his forces, the AI ships were taking tremendous damage on the way in. They weren’t using coordinated defenses. The destroyers and lighter ships allowed the missiles aimed at the superdreadnoughts to pass unmolested, focused on what was inbound for themselves only.

  That was a stroke of luck that Jared doubted very seriously would be repeated, yet he wasn’t going to turn it down. He’d ordered his forces to launch an alpha strike at the superdreadnoughts. The resulting cloud of missiles obliterated the heavy vessels.

  That made this first fight significantly easier to win than he’d expected, but Jared was absolutely certain it would be his last lucky break. The next enemy task force was the same size as his fleet, and it wouldn’t make the same mistake.

  At their closest approach with the first group, the fire became intense, and ships on both sides began falling out of formation and dying. Thankfully, most of the dying took place on the enemy side, but he was still losing people and vessels.

  Invincible took some hits, but nothing got past her battle screens. By the time she was in the middle of the enemy ships, there was nothing left but crippled cruisers and half-functional battlecruisers. The superdreadnoughts on the enemy side had been eradicated, and the destroyers hadn’t survived the missile duel.

  At beam range, they had to deal with a lot of energy weapons, and that caused even more damage to his ships, including Invincible. His flagship lurched when a battlecruiser unloaded its beams directly into her side.

  Jared ignored the damage to his flagship. It was Marcus’s job to deal with that. He had a fleet to fight.

  And that was a fight that he won. He lost a dozen destroyers, three light cruisers, and a heavy cruiser. Most of his remaining ships had varying degrees of damage, and they had hundreds of escape pods behind them that they were going to have to come back and find once the fighting was done.

  If they survived.

  With the damage they’d taken, the second enemy force matched them in combat effectiveness. If Kelsey didn’t win against the master AI before the engagement began, a lot of his ships were going to die.

  It was entirely possible that she’d win the fight against the master AI only to find that Persephone and Caduceus were the only surviving friendly ships in the system.

  If that was what it took to save humanity, it was a hefty price, but he’d pay it without hesitation. He and his people had to do their part to keep the enemy ships distracted while his sister did what had to be done. He only prayed it would be enough.

  35

  Talbot had already given the orders to the marines and Raiders standing guard around his wife, Carl, Julia, and Elise. Not all of the marines had miniaturized battle screens created by the young scientist, but everyone on the front line did. The units were strapped to their arms and acted like old-fashioned shields.

  They’d activated them even as the door was opening, and the wave of plasma that blasted across them was deflected to the sides and up by the angled shields. That saved their lives from the initial blast, but it wouldn’t save them from the next. That single hit had eroded the power of the defensive screen by over half.

  “Take out those weapon systems,” he ordered.

  The forces at the front raced through the hatch even as secondary troops made their way forward to cover the critical people he was guarding. They had the last of the portable battle screens.

  The plasma units in the area they were invading continued to fire, and he watched as men and women under his command were obliterated in job lots. Their deaths tore at him, but they didn’t die quietly. They fought back hard.

  Based on the scanner readings, there was a pair of automated plasma guns just inside the entrance. Marines continued to pour through the hatch until both of the damned things had been silenced.

  The death toll was far higher than Talbot had hoped it would be. They were down to less than half the strength that they’d started the mission with now. Throwing his people into that terrible hole was like tossing them into a meat grinder.

  And he was sure it wasn’t the only defense that the master AI had waiting for them. They’d be lucky if any of them survived to make it to the computer.

  The marines and Raiders led the charge into the computer center and ran into a wall of flechettes, decimating their number again. No, far worse than decimating them. They lost half of the remaining marines in less than five seconds.

  Once again, his people stood their ground and fought. The paranoid artificial intelligence had packed that room with offensive armament, and it was well protected. As much as it hurt him, Talbot ordered the last of his people in. All he held back was the team protecting his wife, Julia, Elise, and Carl.

  And of course, that was when the artificial intelligence set off plasma charges under the deck inside the computer center, wrecking it. The blast was so strong that it knocked him off his feet and threw him back down the corridor.

  Talbot’s armor screamed alarms at him as portions of it failed under the assault. The portable battle screen had probably saved his life. A quick check showed that all of his charges were still alive, though their armor was in worse condition than his.

  The fighting in the chamber ahead had ended. The booby traps under the floor had killed everyone inside it.

  That didn’t mean that Talbot was blind, though. Even though their occupants had been slain, several suits of powered armor still provided telemetry and scanner feeds. The computer center had been utterly destroyed.

  Which had to mean that the master AI hadn’t been there.
Yet the computer center’s rear wall had somehow survived the blast while all of the other bulkheads had been breached.

  Talbot focused the scanners he could access on that wall and found that it was protected by stealth fields. It was also very thick based on how much of it had survived the blast.

  “Carl, I’m sending you some telemetry,” he said. “I think the master AI is on the other side of this bulkhead. What do you think?”

  The young scientist responded just a couple of seconds later. “That’s not standard for any computer center I’ve ever seen. Considering that we have to be close to where the fusion plants are, I’d wager that that bulkhead was reinforced to protect both the master AI and the engineering section.

  “I’m not sure how we get through it. It’s obviously well protected, and there probably won’t be any hatches. There’s no need for access when it’s got mechanical minions that can perform any repairs. Engineering and the master AI are going to be sealed up tight and self-sufficient.”

  “We’ve lost everyone,” Kelsey said, her voice filled with anguish. “If we run into another ambush like that, we’re gone, and so is humanity.”

  “Those plasma mines won’t have been the only booby trap inside that compartment,” Talbot agreed. “No matter what we do, we’re going to run into more resistance. I think I’m going to have to use one of the big plasma charges and breach the bulkhead.”

  “You know that’s a trap, right?” Jake Peters said grimly.

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ve got to try. The only way to clear it is to set it off.”

  Peters considered that and nodded slowly. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

  He picked up the large satchel with the plasma charge from where it had been thrown onto the deck by the shock wave, but rather than handing it to Talbot, the man dodged around him and dashed into the chamber of horrors.

  “Our blood for the Empire!”

  Talbot recognized the pre-Fall Marine Raiders’ battle cry even as he lunged after the man, only to force himself to stop. Peters had made his choice. If there were any booby traps left in that room, the AI had no choice but to take him out. If that happened, Talbot would have to avenge him and finish clearing the room.